Translation Archives - wash your language

Courgetti

February 9, 2020 by EmmaP Leave a Comment

I laughed when I noticed the name on this packet I had picked up in Tesco. The spirally courgettes (ridiculously cut up and ready for me to cook, when I could of course have done it myself, but they were on the cheapo shelf) had already gone into that evening’s stir-fry.

Who’s ever heard of Courgetti? I chuckled to my family. They must have made that up. Mixing up their courgettes and their zucchini. Or, actually they mixed up courgettes and spaghetti – and that is a thing now. Tesco did not mess up, or invent the name. Courgetti – courgettes cut up into spirals – have become a standard alternative for many to wheat-based noodles.

Best of all, in the US – where they eat zucchini, not courgettes – they’re called Zoodles!

I buy courgettes in the supermarket here in Ireland, though in Tuscany I would have asked for zucchine and in Canada they’re zucchini. Why the difference?

This thin-skinned summer squash, a younger version of a marrow, the courgette actually originated in the Americas – along with the other members of the Squash family (known as cucurbits) which includes melon, pumpkins and cucumbers. These were all a staple in central and south American for centuries and started making their way to European kitchens from the 16th century on.

The Italian name – Zucchini – is the diminutive form of Zucca (the name for squash or pumpkin). In many parts of Italy a single one is called a zucchina (plural zucchine) and in others (Tuscany, Piedmont and Sardinia), it’s more typically masculine, zucchino (plural zucchini). It became a popular vegetable to cultivate in northern Italy in the 19th century, coinciding with the immigration of many Italians to the US and so the name stuck there. A lovely example of culinary re-introduction. (Note that zucchini is always plural in English, you don’t say I’ll cut up a zucchino. But then, we don’t throw a single spaghetto onto the wall to see if it will stick. Not something you’d see in an Italian kitchen.)

The French word – Courgette – is standard in other English-speaking countries: the UK, Ireland, New Zealand, Malaysia and South Africa. (Australians stuck with zucchini for some reason). Obviously it’s a key ingredient in many French dishes, but it’s actually quite a recent entry into the language, only first appearing in the OED in 1931.

Squash is also used in some countries, that’s what we would be buying in a Norwegian supermarket for example.

The marrow is a trope of English gardening, with weird competitions of marrow-growing featuring heavily in my memories of 1970s sitcoms. I like to think Roald Dahl had fun with this, when his BFG eats his disgusting snozzcumbers (cucumbers being a cousin of squash).

Living for many years with a Canadian the two of us still switch back and forth between the two main names for this bitter but buoyant vegetable, confusing our kids (who don’t even like it). I like to use both names: I’ll fry up thick diagonal slices of courgette (a la Toscana) for my pizza, but one of my favourite things to bake is Chocolate Zucchini Loaf. I could never bring myself to call it Chocolate Courgette Loaf. Yuk!

Tune in another time and we’ll have a look at eggplants… I mean, aubergines… or melanzani.

Ancient Palermo

May 7, 2019 by EmmaP Leave a Comment

I spotted a few of these trilingual signs last week when we were in Palermo. Written in Italian, Hebrew and Arabic you can find them on some of the streets in the old Jewish area of this fascinating city.

In April 2017 the signs were defaced by vandals who blacked out the non-Italian names. It didn’t take long for some civic groups – and the mayor himself – to get involved in cleaning them up and ensure this bit of local heritage was not muddied. Apparently the Hebrew isn’t even really correct, just a quick transliteration of the Italian name. An indication that the signs (and the idea behind them) are a modern, and public, labelling of the area’s heritage.

Palermo is really ancient, founded by Phoenicians – that is, the guys who came before the Greeks. Jews were part of the huge mix of people and they lived just fine under the various rulers of Sicily, like the Normans and the Arabs. At one point Palermo had 300 mosques. But it all changed in 1492 when the Jews of Sicily were forced (by the new Spanish rulers) to go into exile or convert to Catholicism. The population never really recovered.

Here’s a link to an Italian story about the signs if you’re interested.

And a link to an interesting NYTimes story.

Besotted by Bassets

April 30, 2019 by EmmaP Leave a Comment

It’s becoming a saga – this business of our family not yet having a dog. My elder daughter and I spend a lot of time discussing breeds and looking at other people’s dogs. Like this little fella we saw last week in Sicily while out for a passeggiata with friends in Catania.

I would call this dog Dachshund, or a sausage dog. Dachshund meaning Badger Dog in German. I guess there’s a reason for that.

“Che bel Bassotto” my friend called him.

“A Bassotto?” I asked. “Then what do you call a Basset Hound?” He didn’t know but I went home and looked it up. In Italian, Bassets are also called Bassotto or just “Basset Hound”.

Bassotto comes from the French “bas”, meaning low. And Basset Hound comes from the same kind of root – Basset meaning “quite low”.

But these two breeds are not really related to each other (according to another quick Google search); the droopy eared one is English and the cute sausagey one is German.

And – for the record – neither of them is related to a Beagle. Which in Italian is called “un Beagle”.

To confuse me even more, my younger daughter points me to her Italian Donald Duck comic book (which she still reads weekly) and points out the gang of bumbling bad guys – in Italian they’re called La Banda Bassotti. Meaning, the Dachshund gang.

“Ah those guys”, says my husband, “when I was a kid and read those comics they were called the Beagle Boys“.

And sure enough, these guys have a pet/guard dog called “Ottoperotto”. Who is a Dachshund.

Never mind all these cute beagles, bassets and sausage dogs. We might just make do with something simpler, like a labrador.

(You can check out an earlier post I wrote about how Italians love their dogs, whatever the breed)

(Oh, and the word besotted? That’s not connected. It comes from to become a sot (a fool, or drunkard).

The Irish for Brexit

July 26, 2018 by EmmaP Leave a Comment

“Brexit” is now a universally-known word and it is used as is, with no local translation. Brexit is Brexit in every language. Every language, but one – Irish.

The word Brexit was first coined in 2012, eight months before David Cameron announced he would be holding a referendum on the UK’s exit from the EU. The word was a natural successor to the word “Grexit” – the suitably-classical sounding name used to describe one solution to Greece’s massive debt issues. It’s not a technical term: but it’s a nickname – or actually a portmanteau – that has stuck, referring to the whole process of the UK leaving the EU.

“Brexit” won out over some weaker, and unpronounceable, alternatives, like “Ukexit” and the biscuity-flavoured “Brixit”. It was added to the OED in 2016 by which stage offshoot words were appearing: brexiteer, to brexit as well as Bregret, Bremain and remoaners. A child in Germany was even christened with it, according to the Express anyway.

Take note that the term Brexit is not fully accurate – it is not just Britain that plans to leave, but the entire UK (which consists of Great Britain and Northern Ireland), though some of those individual elements voted to stay. I won’t get into the politics here. Really I won’t.

Names for possible EU-exits by other countries have thrown out some fun word-play. Here are some of my favourites:

Nullgaria
Fraurevoir
Full (for Hungary)
Quitaly
Luxgettouttahere
Forsakia
Byerland (for Ireland)

So why haven’t other languages decided to adapt a local version of Brexit? Why didn’t, say, the French come up with their own word , as they usually do? What about languages that don’t typically use an X or where “exit” doesn’t work?

Could it be because Brexit was not meant to be a long-term thing? That it would be done and dusted quickly and easily? Or because only one country is likely to want to really pull out of the EU (even if they are still figuring out how, when, and even why)?

So how about the Irish – why did we bother to translate Brexit? First, some background:

The Irish language is spoken across the island of Ireland, north and south, and the Republic of Ireland is officially a bilingual country. I am far from being a fluent speaker, but I paid my dues and did the 14-odd years of it at school, (and yes I did do honours for the Leaving, to my credit).

As a race, we’re known to be contrary – and as our own language was suppressed for several centuries by the English invader it’s no surprise that we like to adapt concepts to our own linguistic viewpoint. (You could say it’s making a statement, but who would actually notice, except us?)

So in the Irish language, there are in fact two words in use for Brexit.

The main media outlets in Ireland (which are English-speaking) of course use Brexit – and you should be aware that it’s probably more in the news in this country than even Britain, and more Irish people know what’s going on with the latest negotiations (or lack of) than many people in Britain. Why? Because no other country, even the UK itself, will be as directly affected by the exit when/if it happens. (A quick recap: trade, citizens’ rights, education, banking services, and the small matter of the Northern Irish border.)

As a bilingual country, Ireland has a thriving Irish-language media: one dedicated TV station, several radio stations, plenty of print and online publications.

And the Irish-language media chose not to use Brexit but came up with their own word: Breatimeacht.

“Breatimeacht” is the official Irish word used on the Nuacht (News). It’s a clever portmanteau that works well:

“na Breataine” = Britain

“imeacht” = leaving.

Irish-language guru Darach Ó Séaghdha, author of Motherfocloir and founder of the podcast, has written:

“some critics have pointed out that translation offers the opportunity for correction – it’s the UK that’s leaving, not the geographical entity of Britain. This has led to Sasamach being more popular in some quarters (Sasana, England, amach, out).”

This secondary word – Sasamach – is now being used (first coined by @tuigim) and I think it’s quite brilliant. Sasana (which stems from the word Saxon) refers to England, not Britain.

If you’re getting confused at this stage about UK/England/Britain/British Isles, here’s a handy quick guide:

Source: Wikipedia/Terminology of the British Isles

The Irish word for an English person is “sasanach” and it’s a word that has appeared in many songs and poems over hundreds of years, often referring to how said Englishmen should best be booted out of Ireland.

Songs that evoke this kind of carry-on:

So – Sasamach is now doing the rounds to mean Brexit, as “amach” means out, so roughly speaking it’s a more forceful “Brits out”.

(Now, technically speaking “amach” means the process of moving out. Once you’re outside the word is “amuigh”. Maybe the word will need to change, in English too, but at this rate there’s no sign that they ever will be fully out.)

Language problems have started to plague other elements of Brexit in the last couple of weeks: the White Paper published in July was translated by the Foreign Office into 23 languages (including Irish) and the quality of translations was widely criticised, causing more British bemoaning about their level of language learning.

And for the Irish? Does our deliberate transliteration of Brexit mean we want it to happen, or not? Or are we just continuing our centuries-old habit of pushing around the confines of language?

The Truth about the British Isles

June 22, 2018 by EmmaP Leave a Comment

It’s a bit of sport for Irish people to watch how a successful Irish person – like Saoirse Ronan – is called British by the media. Over the years I’ve had to explain many times (even to English people), that we are not British, or part of Britain, or the UK. But we are in the British Isles, though not the British Islands. More complicated is Northern Ireland which is part of the UK, but not part of Britain. But it’s also in Ireland but it also depends on your point of view…

This week, the best female chef in the world award went to Clare Smyth. Born in N.Ireland she lives in London, where she got the job to cater the royal wedding (their royals, not ours, though I am also technically Canadian so they are mine too…)

In most papers (Irish Times, the Telegraph, Northern papers) she’s “Northern Irish”.
In the Irish Independent she “Irish”.
In the Guardian she’s “a Briton”.
And in other local papers she’s just “Antrim-born”.

(Quick tip – you’ll only offend Irish people if you get things mixed up. Though the Scots might not like it, or the Welsh, or some Manx, or whatever people from Guernsey are called…)

If you’re still confused, here’s a nifty diagram I think is excellent.

And you can read a really detailed explanation on the British Isles in Wikipedia.

Two girls in a tree

November 9, 2017 by EmmaP 4 Comments

Two old friends climb a tree in an Oslo wood. They’re only 8 years old but these girls are fierce; in their minds anything is possible.

They haven’t seen each since two years ago, when we moved away from Norway to Italy. My girl has moulded herself into a new life and a new language. She has mostly forgotten how to speak Norwegian but she remembers her life here and her best friend from the nature kindergarten that got them out in the woods (and up trees) several times a week, all year round.

They have often talked about each other during the two years, which is a long time at this age: “Mummy when are we going back to Oslo and when can I see her and overnight and watch films on their big screen in the basement?”

And on this visit, (only our second since we left), they’ll see each other. The two mums have made a plan to spend a few hours out in the woods around Oslo, a huge element of Norwegian life that our whole family has missed.

It’s October and the sky is clear but also crisp, so we remember to bring hats and scarves but we don’t need boots. There are big grins and hugs as they see each other in person – a little taller, two years of school behind them but otherwise they’re no different.

We drive a short distance. The car doors open and like a pair of retrievers they jump out and bound off into the woods, just as they were trained to do. Within two minutes, when the rest of us get out, we’ve lost them.

We find them again, yapping away in some language between Norwegian and English. They’ve found part of a swinging rope dangling off a tree at the lake edge. My Norwegian-mother-mode kicks in, overriding my Irish-mother-mode (and well past the nervous Italian-mode that never really took hold) and I stop myself from telling them to “be careful!… forskitig!” They’ve done this more than I have, they’ll know what to do.

Moving countries and travelling with children, I’ve seen many times how children can settle quickly into a mode of play even when they can’t speak to each other.

This Norwegian friend has been learning some English – from travelling with her parents and from school – and it’s fun for her to have a friend she can speak it with.

And my girl? Who lived here from birth until six, who spoke Norwegian every day and yet is today puzzled when I use regular family words like barnehage (kindergarten) or even pølse (hotdog)?

I know her Norwegian is lodged deep inside that powerful little brain – the powers of communication, the memories and associations and feelings that come with speaking certain words, phrasing things in a particular way. When she does say something she remembers – like the phrasebook-like question she pulled out of thin air to impress the passport officer at the airport yesterday, hvem spiser brød? (who eats bread?) – even then, she says it with that perfect pronunciation I never managed after seven years living in this country.

Here up in the tree, she responds to her friend with any scraps of Norwegian that come out – some fundamental phrases like se her (look here) or nei, ikke sånn (no, not like that). But she’s also using English words, and she’s actually doing something I’ve never seen before, something remarkable. She’s speaking English to her really slowly and carefully, like an older person might use with a little child who they think understands no English. “Can… we… go… over… there…and… try… that?” and “This…bit…here…look”.

Where did she get this from? I don’t think she’s ever seen me speak like that to someone on our travels. Did her teachers in Italy speak to her like that after we had just moved there, in a way to help her clearly hear the words? I think not, as they were fast talkers.

By slowing down her English speech, it’s as if a part of her subconscious has kicked in to rationalise and slow down her words, to watch carefully her friend’s face and make sure her point gets across, when the Norwegian words have failed her.

The swing no longer provides amusement – they can’t agree on who does what – and we move on to a treehouse a local kindergarten has made in another part of the forest. Within another hour it’s starting to get darker and colder and we have to say goodbye. But just that small amount of time, and inventive communication, has been sufficient to add a little more glue to this long-distance friendship. That’s good enough for now.

These Crazy Celts!

March 10, 2017 by EmmaP 1 Comment

I’m Irish, which means I’m a Celt. I’m strong and bold and proud of… all the things we’re supposed to be proud of. I don’t have red hair and only drink moderately but I love the music and art and language of my homeland, all of which are widely considered to be “Celtic”. And I am charged with carrying forward all this legacy, this Celtic-ness, to my own two daughters, to teach them to stand up proud and be counted as Celtic women!

But it looks like they have their own ideas as to what that word might mean. And I might need to revise some of my own thinking – as I found out last weekend.

Celts in Italy?

We took a few days off to go skiing a few hours northwest of Florence, in the Apennine mountains along the border of Tuscany and Emilia Romagna. We discovered that the cheap self-catering place we had booked online was not only remote and hard to find but was actually a intact, restored “celtic” medieval mini-village (called a borgo in Italy) at the otherwise-uninhabited base of Monte Cimone.

Near to our lodgings there were various Celtic remains, which included a stone and thatch hut that was rebuilt to show the typical home of the assorted Celtic tribes that were living (well actually hiding) in the area around the 4th century. They were being slowly driven north by those determined Romans – who eventually succeeded in their task, pushing whatever was left of the Celts to cling on at the edges of Europe (my own homeland included). There were Celtic tribes were all over Europe and you can find traces of them in most central European countries and where the Romans didn’t push them out, they were eventually converted to Christianity and mostly disappeared.

“You know, the Celts weren’t as organised as the Romans” says our 10 year old as we climb along the interpretative path to reach the hut. “They were a bit all over the place, quite violent. And they had a thing about heads”. She’s been studying this at school – the Celts get about 4 pages in her history book, unlike the 50 pages of Roman history she’ll be slogging through for the rest of the term.

*The steps along the hut’s side were for yearly maintenance of the thatch, a tradition still going in Ireland, where similar huts were found.*

Celts, Kelts or Chelts?

The hut was called a Capanna Celtica – if you pronounce Celtica the Italian way it’s with a Ch. The 8 year old in the back seat tries out the pronunciation – Cheltica – and it sounds strange to my ears. “How do you say it in English?”, she asks. My hard-wired Irish-educated reaction is to firmly tell the kids in the that in this family we use the hard C like a K, “Celtic”. Unless it’s for a football club in Glasgow. “Or the Boston Celtics”, chips in their dad.

But if you dig around a bit, on the internet no less, you quickly discover that this is a complicated issue.

The pronunciation of the word is a modern invention. Julius Caesar would have pronounced it Keltic (apparently) but in Britian it was taken up with an S back in the middle ages. The romantic Celtic revivalist movement of the 19th century, in Ireland and Britain, brought the hard C back into fashion and it has stuck.

Here’s a fantastic, and deliciously mean, quote from a piece published during the 1850s by the Celtic Union in Ireland.

“Of all the nations that have hitherto lived on the face of the earth, the English have the worst mode of pronouncing learned languages. This is admitted by the whole human race […] This poor meagre sordid language resembles nothing so much as the hissing of serpents or geese. […] If we follow the unwritten law of the English we shall pronounce (Celt) Selt but Cæsar would pronounce it, Kaylt. Thus the reader may take which pronunciation he pleases. He may follow the rule of the Latin or the rule of the English language, and in either case be right…”

A Celtic Chip

I think my sense of being Celtic was drummed into me over many years and I carried it around like a chip on my shoulder. At school we learned that the Celtic artwork of Ireland was the highest point of our artistic heritage, revered around the world. Last summer I dragged the family around the “Treasures” room of the National Museum in Dublin, to be awed by the Tara Brooch and Cross of Cong. To my eye they’re still astonishing, to theirs a little less so – as attested by my not being able to take a photo of them standing still in front of one of these receptacles of national pride.

I studied the History of Art at college and during a year of study in Florence in the 1990s there was a huge blockbuster exhibition on about the Celts, one of the first big comprehensive exhibitions about them. I never got to see it but I got my hands on the enormous catalogue and was horrified – on behalf of my entire nation – to see how little Irish art had been included. How could they? What wonders they were missing out on! The exhibition, I realise now, was focused on the earlier origins of these peoples – the likes of those building huts with thatched roofs to be discovered years later by tourists stopping by on their way to the ski slopes.

The golden age of “Celtic art” on show at the Dublin museum (between the 600s and 800s) really uses the term as a romantic name for a style, to call it something in contrast to the artistic void that was the dark ages in the rest of Europe. Those soft-accented, bald-headed monks who laboured for years over illuminated manuscripts and the artisans who pressed precious stones into mitres left amazing prizes behind them before the Vikings arrived and started messed things up.

Cartoon Celts

What the kids know about the Celts is a bit broader and more up to date. Apart from those history classes, this Horrible Histories book is one of a series which recently appeared in the house. It includes plenty of discussion about what they did with heads, sanitary customs and other yucky details.

Asterix books are also popular in the house, and with Italians. These long-loved stories of the plucky little Gauls (what the Romans called Celts) up in their corner of Brittany with their secret strength potion, and appetite for dancing and wild boar, were constantly beating up the Romans.

Indeed Obelix’s famous catchphrase – These Romans are Crazy! – works beautifully in Italian.

“Sono Pazzi Questi Romani”

– which nicely echoes the SPQR, the official title of Rome (Senātus Populusque Rōmānus: The Roman Senate and People). They were crazy alright, but in the world of Asterix they never quite got the better of them.

So here we are, a family of Celts in Tuscany, battling against the stereotypes and trying to make sense of it all. At this stage of my life, having lived in several places, I can claim many other identities that just the ancient Celtic – Canadian, New Yorker, Londoner, Norwegian, even a little Tuscan. And my kids even more so, with their feet in several homelands.

Maybe I shouldn’t mention to them the fact that being a Dubliner by birth I’m probably more Viking than anything else.

The meaning of snow

January 26, 2017 by EmmaP Leave a Comment

It’s been snowing for a few days up here in the hills above Florence – delicately, sometimes with fat flakes that you can catch in your mouth. There’s not enough to stick to the ground and local life is only slightly disrupted, some people who live further out in the countryside are actually snowed in and can’t get to school. But there isn’t much panic, just patient tolerance as it surely won’t last. As veterans of hard winters we are charmed and I have to stop myself from stopping the car to take another photo of an olive tree blanketed in white. I learn the term “bufera di neve” which sounds soft and gentle but which I’m surprised to learn means blizzard. Tuscan-style.

Our 7-year-old attends a Montessori school in the woods and on Monday we meet the other kids at the start of the day, it’s slowly becoming whiter around us. One of the dads brings up that old chestnut, about how Eskimos have 40 different words for snow. “Which makes sense”, he says, “think of all the different types of snow there are”. And we do think about it: the stuff that falls out of the sky, sometimes fat, sometimes fast. The hard-packed stuff and the stuff that’s almost too fluffy to hold onto, the stuff for moving through and the stuff that has to be dug out of your way to get anywhere, the blowy blustery stuff and the snow you can use to build something, sled or ski through.

My daughter is indeed a child of snow. During the hours before she was born, to ease the labour pains I walked and walked, (yes I was tough) through the historic cemetery close to our Oslo home. It was snowing hard, the air was dampened and our (good) boots stomped tracks through the soft powder, past the graves of Munch and Ibsen and the WWII resistance fighters, feeling strangely comforted to walk among these old souls. Within a few hours we got to meet our own little Norwegian.

A few years later we walked through the same graveyard every day to her nature kindergarten, which brought the children into the woods outside the city 3 days a week. Over her 2 years with that group, this tough girl clocked up many hours of trekking through snow, sledding down hills, chopping wood, building shelters, a latrine and obstacle courses in the trees. In all weathers. She knows more about snow than I ever will.

I didn’t grow up with snow in Dublin and have only as an adult come to know and respect it. By marrying a Canadian I made a serious lifestyle choice which was further compounded by living for several years in eastern Canada and then, when we started raising our kids in Norway. But there we took it on as a part of life which affected almost every aspect of daily life 4-6 months of the year.

And here we are now in the woods outside Florence, looking at this almost foreign-looking snow falling through the tall Roman pines, we almost crave it as it’s been so long since we’ve seen it. The kids open their mouths and catch the fat flakes when they see them, they’re transported with delight. A week before it snowed near us, my daughter’s friend who lives deep in the country arrived at school one morning with a cloth bag around her neck. She produced from the bag, very carefully, a glass jar. Opening it up she proudly showed us a mushy mess and declared “Snow from my garden!”

Now I watch my daughter listening intently to the young Italian dad discussing the eskimos and I realise I’m disappointed to think that her deep, deep connection to this cold white stuff in its many forms and shapes and surroundings and uses and receptacles of emotion is limited to just one word. In English we just call it snow, and in Oslo, we used the very Norwegian-sounding word snø though if you dig deeper there other words available.

And what about this whole 40 Eskimo words thing? It’s an idea that has stuck with people but it’s basically not true, a linguistic misconception and a more complex issue which I can only suggest you read up on it. Similar ideas that circulate include there being numerous Irish words for rain. In fact I just read last week in the local paper – and this was of great interest to the dad – about the dozens of phrases for “it’s bloody cold” in Tuscan towns and villages.

I watch my girl stick out her tongue to catch another flake and run off down the road towards the school with her classmates and teachers. And I know that she and I know that words don’t really matter so much. It’s the feelings and the memories that stick.

Finding Hitchcock

January 12, 2017 by EmmaP Leave a Comment

The time has come for us to start weaning our children off the films that only they want to watch. In the age of Netflix it’s so easy to leave them to their own devices, literally, and we have to make an effort to sit together and watch a film as a family: their dad and I are reliving our own glowing memories from childhood of enjoying films as a family together on the couch (including hiding behind it as Indy battles with the snakes).

So to start our plan to watch more interesting films, together, we started with Star Wars (it took a couple of goes but then they really took to the fantastical element of it and have now seen every film), Singin in the Rain (who doesn’t love Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds?) and then Back to the Future (lots of swearing and we had to explain what a Walkman is).

But we needed a good adventure film, with spies and suspense and action. My own favourite is North by Northwest – so we thought we’d start with that. We’re unapologetically old-school and we like watching a physical movie on the TV screen, so before going jumping onto Amazon to buy a copy I thought I’d try the library. Yes, very old-school.

Over our years of living in foreign countries, we’ve become experts on making the most of the library system wherever we are, especially for browsing films. This goes back to our time in New York (around 1999-2002) when we lived close to the fabulous Brooklyn Public Library. We would indulge in raiding their film catalogue, scanning each shelf at a time and carting home our tote bag laden down with a few brick-like VHS tapes, many of which then refused to work that Saturday night. But we enjoyed catching up on some random choices like Powell & Pressburger and Kurosawa, and watching anything with music by Michel Legrand or hair by Veronica Lake. We were also lucky during our 7 years in Oslo to live close to the central library there (the grandly named Deichmanske Bibliotek) and had lots of cinema to choose from, though the foreign-language films often had no English subtitles so we no doubt missed out on a few years’s worth of Brazilian and Hong Kong blockbusters.

So here I am now looking for the 1959 Hitchcock classic to watch with our kids and I head to our local library in Fiesole – it’s a small town and we’re lucky to have a library. It actually has a decent selection of classic and modern films on DVD, and still some VHS. Because there are surely some Tuscan households that still use one.

I start to browse through the DVDs for North by Northwest. I look for the letter N in the titles. No joy, the titles are all a bit jumbled and not shelved according to any alphabet I know. I look to see if they might be organised by genre, or then by country – Italian vs non-Italian. Still no luck.

I interrupt the librarian at her desk, she looks up and smiles (as they do the world over). “How are your DVDs organised?” And she answers, “Oh they’re shelved according to director”.

Of course they are. This is after all the nation of cinema lovers: Italians take their cinema extremely seriously and worship their filmmakers as much as their Renaissance artists. Who wouldn’t know their Pasolini from their Fellini, or even their Spielberg from their Scorsese? Fair enough, I’ve actually studied some of this stuff myself and I can find them on these shelves.

But when it comes to more popular movies, what do you do? What about all those mindless action movies, sequels, random 1970s family movies? Could you name the director of any Bond movie or the auteur behind Frozen?

Still, I have an easy one and I find the Hitchcock selection. Here’s a nice range of his titles, but they’ve changed all the names! (I’m sure they didn’t do that in Norway.) But these do sound quite nice in Italian: “I 39 Scalini” (The 39 Steps) and “Rebecca, La Prima Moglie” (the first wife). But no sign of Cary Grant in his immaculate suit. I do take home the Man who Knew Too Much (which proved to be a bit spookier than I’d remembered, Hitch uses lack of music to great effect).

With no luck at this library I check the central library in Florence next time I’m in the centre of town. It’s a relatively-recent library, in a lovely renovated old convent. But the contents are a different story. Their cinema section proves to be less organised than our own up here and it’s clear they get a lot more customers, or at least ones who have DVD-players equipped with steel teeth. The films are here organised differently: by title. Heimat sits between Harold & Maude and Heat. Who makes these decisions? Who knows?

The DVDs are shoved downwards into pull-out shelves and you have to make an effort to look through them. Still, I stumble on some fun titles I wouldn’t otherwise see, like this collection of four Jacques Tati films (which has about half the contents intact):

But still no North by Northwest and then I realise – of course they’ve changed the name of that one too! Taking out my phone I cobble onto the sickly Wi-Fi offered by the library and discover online that I should actually be looking for “Intrigo Internazionale” – International Intrigue. (Which is odd, as the film doesn’t go much further than South Dakota.) They don’t have it, but at least now I’m armed with more information.

In the end I find the movie in the Feltrinelli bookshop near the Duomo – they have a cheap DVD section upstairs. For 8 euros we can keep it all to ourselves and build up our own little library at home. And sort them however we like.

P.S. The kids really enjoyed it and had loads of questions about it afterwards, mostly about guns and kisses.

P.P.S Here’s a list of all the Hitchcock titles in Italian if you’re interested.

Doggy bag? Sì, grazie!

October 20, 2016 by EmmaP

We live in Florence and so we’ve had visitors come to stay. As you’d expect we usually take them out to eat and sometimes – after a serious 3 or 4-course affair – someone might declare they’re full and suggest they bring home the leftovers. “How do I ask for a doggy bag?” “Umm… well”, I reply. “It’s not really what you, um, do here”. So they order some more wine and keep picking at their steak and grilled fennel. Which I assure them wouldn’t taste the same tomorrow anyway.

In Italy you eat what is on your plate. There is an unspoken understanding between the chef and you: that she/he knows how much you should eat of a certain dish to satisfy your taste and that you should know yourself how much you can handle today. There is still a strong current of resusing unused food in traditional recipes – like in Tuscany where old bread is used for the next day’s Ribollita soup (my preferred comfort food) or Panzanella, bread salad.

*Lunch at the Mercato Centrale, Florence*

But recently Italians have started to admit they can’t always finish up their meals and are trying – with the help of the government – to embrace a new concept. The doggy bag.

The name – doggy bag – is thought to originate in wartime America where responsible citizens were encouraged to feed their pets only with table scraps, taking them home in wrapped up wax paper bags marked with “Bones for Bowser”. Diners soon starting asking for it for themselves and the concept stuck. This is from an interesting Smithsonian article I found.

doggie-bag-resized-600 — *Courtesy of Tuscantraveler.com*

While it’s easy to ask for a doggy bag in an American or Canadian restaurant it’s just not common in many parts of “Europe”. Taking care of your leftovers is popular with thrifty and conscientious hipsters as well as graphic designers, and big-shot English chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall leads a campaign called Too Good to Waste, an effort to persuade nicer British establishments to offer doggy boxes. They have a cute slogan: Be a lover, not a leaver.

But the issue goes well beyond individual diners and into the much wider global issues of food and waste management. The FAO has estimated that 40% – that’s 40% – of food produced in Europe goes to waste. France passed some fairly tough laws last year which punish producers who do not deal with the issue. The Italians decided instead to take the kinder track, to instead provide incentives and improve ease of use. Perhaps they were encouraged by the interest taken in the issue by Francesco, everyone’s favourite pope.

In August this year the Italian senate unanimously passed into law a bunch of measures to start dealing with food waste. Aiming to reduce the estimated 5 million tons of food thrown away every year, the measures include ways for companies and farmers to more easily donate unused food to charity by setting realistic rules about sell-by dates and food safety and liability issues.

But of most interest was the inclusion of an initiative to encourage ordinary Italians to break the habit and consider it normal to take their unfinished food home rather than let it go to waste. A budget of one million euros was set aside for a government initiative to persuade people to start using doggy bags – so far it’s hard to see exactly what has been done but it sounds good.

The under-secretary responsible, Barbara Degani, declared “the family bag is a semantic upgrade of the famous doggy bag, allowing us to take the concept out of the ghetto of our imaginary modesty and ask for one at the end of a good meal. The choice to not waste must be the new way of life. So asking for a FB (family bag) is a marker of virtuous behaviour.”

The idea of the family bag is going to take some time to trickle down and will need a push to get people used to the idea. It is a big change. This week there was a news story, for World Food Day, about a “nudging” experiment carried out in a Milanese restaurant. The diners were each left a two-coloured token on their place setting when the meal started. The token was meant to be a neutral way of indicating their interest in taking home what they could not eat. It was left on the table with the green side up, indicating the diner would be happy to have a doggy bag. They had to make a conscious change to red to decline the service. Apparently they were successfully nudged into taking the food home.

We are used to taking extra food home, especially with kids, but we haven’t done it much here apart from the occasional pizza. On a recent IKEA trip, we discovered in their restaurant they have a stack of flatpack doggy boxes. Like any other product it needed assembling and was a bit smaller than expected. I still find it odd to see Italians lunching on meatballs and daim cake (even if the restaurant does sell wine by the glass) but this might give them some ideas in the food recycling department.

Troppo buono per essere spreccato, the boxes declare – too good to chuck away. Trust the Scandinavians to start getting the message across.

—————-

In the Swing of Things

October 7, 2016 by EmmaP

My seven year old is sitting in the dentist’s chair. As dentists go, he’s young and charming, and he has nice ankles – he wears runners with no socks. We communicate in Italian about the child and her teeth. I understand most of what he says, but in a situation like this I find there will be a word or terms that I don’t know. I realize that, once again, I had forgotten to spend 5 minutes before leaving the house to check the dictionary for some other words that might come up, maybe molar or orthodontic surgery.

Living daily life in another language means you’re confronted all the time with new situations, new unknowns. Whether it’s going to a judo class or the climbing park, the pharmacy or the post office, there will be a word or a term that will throw you and you’ll be asking: “I need to get the what before tomorrow?” Or “there’s something wrong with the what in my engine?” (This does of course also happen to Italians especially where paperwork is involved: they don’t necessarily find it any easier to get simple tasks completed).

So when I can I try to prepare by checking some words, anticipating difficult discussions. It took me a few confused yoga lessons before I remembered to look up the Italian words for hips, shoulder blades and twist gently but our teacher’s soothing voice made any position sound great – just try saying la posizione della montagna and you’ll feel yourself calming down.

Before arriving at the dentist my daughter and I talked about what we needed to show him. He was to check all her teeth, one loose tooth and another loose tooth that’s not supposed to be loose. I’m prepared with a few key words: denti da latte (milk teeth) and the evocative denti del giudizio (wisdom teeth). But “loose tooth” – maybe I should have checked that in the dictionary.

So there she is in the chair and I tell the dentist – she has a tooth that is …. aah … moving. “Ah”, he says, “it’s still growing?” “No, no, it’s moving … like this.” And the impatient child pipes up from the chair – sta dondolando! It’s swinging, or in this case, it’s wobbling! Wow, there she goes. My daughter has started translating for me. Of course she would know how to say it, it was probably one of the first things she’d hear from fellow 6-year-olds in the school yard. It’s a bit strange I haven’t heard it before, but I’m probably multi-tasking more on a daily basis. There’s my excuse.

Living daily life in Italian means you get to use fantastic words and expressions every day. The rolling r’s and the double zz’s, it actually feels good to speak it and being here as an older adult I appreciate it even more.

Un dente dondolando – a swinging tooth. Isn’t that wonderful? The word for me conjures a picture of a swaying ski lift hoisting fur-booted skiers up into the Dolomites. Or a cute toddler asked to be pushed on the swing – la dondola. A quick Google search manages to bring up the image of Michael Jackson dangling his child over the balcony (if you remember back that far).

heidi — *From the book we’re reading at bedtime – Heidi Heckelbeck Is Ready to Dance!*

Dondolando – Swinging, swaying, dangling, wobbling, rocking, balancing. That’s indeed what we’ve been doing on a daily basis here, making it up as we go along, all of us balancing between friends and family and familiarities in our homes, old and new.

But now, a year in – and with routines in places, circles of friends and acquaintances set up, local knowledge and our own spaces carved out in this place inhabited by many others over many centuries – we’re mostly gotten into the swing of it ourselves.

The Real Scoop on Gelato

July 6, 2016 by EmmaP

A Japanese friend who has lived in Italy for about 15 years remembers the oddest thing she noticed when she first moved here – a man walking down the street eating an ice cream.

When you live here for a while, you develop a different relationship with gelato from that of your tourist days. As a visitor to Italy gelato is a treat to be savoured – only here can you eat the genuine article, like an original cappuccino. But over the long-term eating gelato – especially during the hot months – becomes part of your routine, indeed your daily nourishment. I could almost use the word “diet” as our own family doctor recently “recommended it” my younger daughter’s sore tummy.

We have a favourite gelateria in Florence, Badiani. We discovered it by chance on our very first August night in the city, staying at a cheap Airbnb flat a few blocks from the stadium. We arrived into this oven on the night of a Fiorentina/AC Milan match and the kids were as perplexed by the noise of helicopters and bright lights as we were by the civilised purple-clad fans chatting and relaxing outside the local wine bars. Good old Google maps pointed us to a gelateria at the other corner of our block and it turned out to be not only our favourite place since then but one of the best, and least- touristy, in the city.

I am not really a big ice-cream person, perhaps due to eating too much of it during the (J1) summer I spent serving ice-cream in Boston, at the well-known local spot Emack and Bolio’s: my one claim to fame was that I served Mark Wahlberg (then known as Marky Mark).

But living here now, especially with children, I enjoy the taste and flavours of gelato in a way I never did before, with so much more satisfaction. Living here as a (clueless) student I went to the same few places over and over and had no sense of good taste – though to be fair, one of them was Vivoli, still wowing customers today. But I think the scene has improved hugely during those 20 years and gelato eaters have become more demanding.

When you get to a point in the day where you’re hot or tired or in need of a pick-me-up, the smallest sized cone will be enough to completely refresh you, as well as your palate. Eating more than 3 scoops on a large cone – that’s starting to overdo it a bit. And not what the locals would always do.

So here are some tips from me on how to eat gelato like a local.

Gelato versus Ice cream
The main difference is that American-style ice cream uses more eggs and cream and is heavier. Italian gelato – which means frozen, so it can actually refer to all types of sweet cold stuff – uses more milk than cream, contains fewer preservatives (if any) so it was probably made very recently, might have a lighter colour and it has fewer and fresher ingredients. It could still have a lot of sugar, depending on the place, but as long as you know … that’s up to you.

You’ll notice the gelato is not always scooped up into a ball and it’s not hard and icy but soft and nearly melted. The best servers will churn it gently with an oblong metal spoon before being gently piling it into your cup or cone.

Choose your gelateria
A shop devoted to selling gelato is called a gelateria (plural = gelaterie) but a cafe or bar might advertise themselves as such too, and they may serve high-quality gelato.

Look for a sign declaring Produzione Propria – which basically means “we make it ourselves”. (In some cases that might mean they made it from a packet, but you’ll learn to spot the difference.)

Avoid the gelaterie that displays their gelato piled up really high, and with bright colours – especially noticeable for pistachio and banana. If it’s from a pre-made gelato mix you might see a little sign displaying the logo of the dairy company alongside the flavours. But some days you’re desperate and you can’t really go too far wrong!

The best gelaterie keep their gelato in steel containers, even sometimes hidden away so you have to choose from the list of flavours on the board and you can always ask to taste them. Quantity of flavours is not always a marker of quality – some of the best and most local places offer just a few flavours. And that usually suits the local clientele just fine.

Choose your price and pay
First choose what size and price you want, pay for it at the cash desk and take the receipt (lo scontrino) to the counter and start choosing from the wonderful array. So if you want a €2 cone or cup you would ask for un cono/una coppetta da due euro.

In some places it’s okay to choose your gelato first and pay after, but this system is helpful as you don’t have to worry about paying extra to sit down, if there are seats, and you don’t have to dig around for change while holding a melting ice-cream.

Cup (una coppetta) or Cone (un cono)?
Eating from a cone is a more sensory experience and can make it last longer. Good, say, if you’re really hungry or driving a car! As for a cup, you could quibble about the wastefulness of the plastic spoon and paper cup, with no obvious method of recycling nearby. But Italians seem to go for either, depending on their mood.

The smallest size (about €2 or less) will usually be enough for you and in most gelaterie you can fit two flavours (gusti) for that. You tend to order by size and then work out with the server how many flavours you want. It’s not so much about the scoops and size, it’s actually more about the marrying of the right flavours.

If they haven’t given you a little spoon (un cucchiaino) it’s polite to ask for one unless you (or your child) can easily access the dispenser.

Taste it first
It’s fine to ask for a taste while you decide, though asking for 4 or 5 might be pushing it. You can say posso assaggiare? (can I try?) or posso gustare? (can I taste?).

Choose your flavours carefully
Flavours that go well together are usually grouped together, in Italian they’d say they marry well (questi gusti si sposono bene).

So for example you shouldn’t really mix cream-based and fruit-based. Why? Because the textures are different; the flavours might clash; one of them is more melted than the other; or just because the server says you shouldn’t really have the mango and coffee together. Indeed I was once refused my chosen combination at our favourite place – I had to bow to their sense of propriety, though they could have been a little less stern about it!

KEY FLAVOURS
Remember, try to combine flavours that sit close together in the cabinet.

The Chocolates
It can be very dark (fondente) or more milky (cioccolato al latte or just cioccolato) or you might find it mixed with orange (arancia) or something spicy (messicano, con chilli etc).

Vanilla
I grew up with vanilla being the standard neutral ice cream you get (if you haven’t really deserved something fancier after that day’s dinner) but in Italy it’s not always on the menu. When you do find it – it’s called vaniglia – in a good gelateria, it will really taste of vanilla.

The Creams
These are the plainer, more neutral flavours, to complement a stronger chocolate or nut. But they can be magnificent in their simplicity. You have crema (often like a bakery cream), panna (more like whipping cream) and the simple Fior di latte (milk). This last is worth ordering just to be able to enunciate such a beautiful name.

A Florentine speciality is Buontalenti, named after the local lad (well, actually an architect to Grand Duke Cosimo) who, many claim, brought gelato into the modern world around 1600. It’s a lovely creamy, milky flavour and a delicious secondary choice.

Straciatella
A simple choice, this is a creamy gelato with chocolate chips. Almost as refreshing as my own favourite, menta (mint usually with chocolate chips).

Pistacchio
Be prepared for a new taste sensation. Pistacchio nuts are the pride of Sicily and they make wonderfully smooth gelato with varying degrees of nuttiness. A good gelateria will offer several styles of pistacchio and my favourite is (of course) Pistacchio da Bronte – named after the small Sicilian town, which eventually became a variant, through the father of those Yorkshire writers, of my own surname, Prunty.

Note that in Italy it’s pronounced the other way, with a hard “c” – Pistakkio.

Other Nuts
I’m not a nut person but my kids assure me you can’t go too wrong with nutty flavours as a primary or counterpoint to chocolate. Hazelnut (nocciola) is common though as it’s an expensive ingredient it’s worth looking for a good-quality and pure version. For a more chocolate-based flavour you’ll find nutella is a common ingredient, as well as Bacio – from the (acquired) taste of the Italian chocolate brand.

The Fruits
A good gelateria follows seasonal pattern of fruits. Some wonderful words to learn here: fragola (strawberry), melone (melon), lampone (raspberry), frutti di bosco (mixed berries), anguria or cocomero (watermelon), arancia (orange), pesca (peach), ciliegia (cherry), fico (fig).

Limone (lemon) is usually year-round and almost a category on its own, with an amazing ability to bring down your temperature and a good measure of the quality of the gelateria.

Semi-freddo and others
This is your section with flavours like Tiramisu or Zuppa Inglese (trifle) which are more like semi-frozen puddingy desserts, not quite ice-cream. Nice if you’re hungry as well as hot.

Some interesting colours are produced from sesame (sesame side gelato, which is gray/purple and considered healthy), liquirizia (licorice, green/brown, let me know if you try it), and a friend swears he once had tabacco (tobacco).

You can also find flavours like riso (rice) and cheese-flavoured gelato like mascarpone, or my current favourite which is ricotta e fichi (ricotta and fig).

Gluten-free and Vegan
Many fruit flavours actually have dairy in them (you can tell by how much the colours of each fruit seem more fruity or more creamy). But more and more gelaterie offer gluten-free or vegan flavours and will usually advertise them. Or you can just ask.

And the best gelato in Florence?
Gelato is good all over Italy though Florence (luckily for us) is considered one of the top spots.

This wasn’t meant to be a guide, but how can I not make a few suggestions?

Downtown the perennial favourites which you’ll find in many guides are Vivoli, Carabè, Perche Nò and La Carraia. I quite like the big multinationals Grom and Venchi, though I prefer the former as they’re all about freshness and have a great location beside the Duomo. Near San Marco there’s the nice Sicilian place Arà è Sicilia that does amazing granitas and on the other side of town at the bottom gate of the Boboli Gardens, at Porta Romana, there’s the friendly and health-conscious Gelateria Yoguteria Porta Romana. But in our house, the favourite by far, even if I find them a little snooty, is Badiani – close to the football stadium and well-off the tourist track but buzzing with well-heeled locals and flat-footed football fans long into the evening. My preferred option for friendliness is further back along the road to the centre, Cavini’s – cheap and fresh and friendly. (In Fiesole I previously recommended Ferro Battuto but as of June 2017 it has not reopened. Best to stick with Le Cure for a gelato nearby.)

How to order like a local
Similar to the art of ordering at a busy cafe, it’s an education to observe how the regulars procure their scoop of the day. Here’s how:

After greeting a few people in the door you drop your coins of exact change in the cashier’s bowl and wander over to the display. You probably already want the same thing you’ve had the last couple of weeks – and many people go for just one flavour in their cup – but maybe you go for something new. You catch the eye of the next server who scoops up your choice in 10 seconds, you’re out the door, hovering to eat it while you chat to another regular. And you’re gone, back to work or your shopping errands or your car, in less than 4 minutes. Or if this is evening-passeggiata time you might linger to chat for another hour. Just play it by ear.

Some other links:

More on gelato in Florence from Emiko Davies
A little history
More on flavours

Happy scooping!

Wash your Language is a blog about real life and language, by an Irish-Canadian exploring the change in pace in Italy after years in Norway. I offer web copyediting and proofreading as well as translation from Norwegian to English and Italian to English. Read more.

The Midsummer Saint

June 23, 2016 by EmmaP

Saint John the Baptist – what a great saint he was! Source of wonderful stories of strength and piety, meeting a dramatic ending that has fuelled many gory images and theatrical overkill for years. His feast day is June 24, tonight is the Eve and an excuse for celebrations in many countries over many centuries. It’s handy that his feast day also happens to be midsummer – the middle of the year and a marking point for many. I think of it as a magical time.

SalomeCar — Caravaggio – Salome with the Head of John the Baptist, NGL (Web Gallery of Art/Wikipedia)

St John – Saint Jean Baptiste – Sant Hans – San Giovanni.

These are the names that have marked each midsummer through my life, and from the earliest years they have made me feel more and more at a remove from the place I still often call home – Dublin.

Our family holidays were spent in Connemara, in the deep west of Ireland, at the unoccupied house of my aunt and uncle – a bungalow perched on a small empty lake with shelves of books, card games to play, four bedrooms to be fought over, turf for the fire (yes, in summer) and no access to drinking water anywhere west of Salthill on the edge of Galway city. As the (clueless) youngest I found myself tagging along with whatever was happening and I have memories, foggy but still there, of being at the house for at least one “St John’s” and joining the local teenagers who were going strangely crazy around a messy bonfire. They were kind to let us Dublin intruders (jackeens) enjoy the moment with them, well they seemed to through their chatting to each other in an Irish I never learned to understand. They had clearly been building up the bonfire for days in a patch well-hidden away from the road, one field through the maze of stone-walled partitioned fields we spent hours navigating in the least rainy of daytimes. Those were my first moments of seeing a parallel life to my own, a glimpse into what it could be like to grow up, to live somewhere other than my world in suburban Dublin.

My husband is from the western folds of Canada but he’s always been a Francophone and held a candle for the romance held for Jean Baptiste in France and Quebec. Always the political type, he travelled with college friends to Quebec in 1995 to persuade the locals to vote “Non!” in the referendum about leaving Canada – over 20 years before today’s vote today in the UK. The result was very tight, and the union held. (There continues to be a sense of two solitudes in Canada, though our man Trudeau junior is doing his darndest.) The main Quebec holiday is actually on June 24 – La Fête de la Saint-Jean-Baptiste, or just La Saint-Jean. This always seemed a much more festive day in Canada, those French Canadians knowing much better how to have fun than the rest of the country on the other official holiday of July 1st – Canada Day. Indeed many Quebecois would choose that day to make their annual move from one rental apartment to another – sorry, we’re busy. During our time living together in Canada we lived in several diverse places, but never managed to set up home in Quebec (or have to deal with its separate immigration process) – so for us it keeps its mystique. Another “other” place.

Living in Norway for seven years, we were bitten by the bug of the Scandinavian Midsummer. In different parts of the country Norwegians have their own traditions but when celebrating in Oslo we were often reminded that “it’s really a Swedish holiday” – that’s where you really want to go for the hard-core celebrations, dancing around poles, fancy costumes and all. In either country it is of course a fantastic opportunity to celebrate – the longest days of the year, a reason to stay up late, be outside, breathe the air and celebrate life. When the kids were very small, we joined a Swedish-style celebration at Oslo’s outdoor folk museum and I was amazed to find myself letting them splash around in a pond with other kids well past 11pm – this was some serious hair-letting-down going on around us. Bonfires were to be found, parties were held late into the night and there was always a sense of holiday about it. Midsummer has such a resonance there, it’s in people’s blood. But it wasn’t in mine and it felt like someone else’s celebration. It wasn’t part of my upbringing, except for those hazy memories of the stone fields in the dark.

Nikolai Astrup - Midsummer Eve Bonfire (Bergen Art Museum) — Nikolai Astrup – Midsummer Eve Bonfire (Bergen Art Museum)

So here we are in Florence – where the patron saint is none other than St John. San Giovanni. And they’ve been celebrating him since medieval times, none better to do so. In Roman times, Florence’s patron was the god Mars and early Christians figured that St John was a good enough match for him, so he became the patron saint. The wonderful Baptistry in front of the Duomo is of course named for him. But what does it means for us newcomers – we have a public holiday tomorrow, we can watch a costumed parade with church celebration which includes the showing of whatever relics Florence got of St John himself, enjoy tomorrow night’s big fireworks show and – if we had the stomach for it – watch some of the calcio storico match/fight going on outside Santa Croce. This is Florence’s less savoury equivalent to the genteel palios of Siena and other cities, a rough, no-holds-barred form of combat where four teams representing the quarters of the city fight over a ball. Maybe we can watch some online afterwards (after enjoying further reruns of the amazing goal from last night’s Ireland-Italy victory!)

June 24, our first midsummer in this place, still at a remove from all the places we have lived and loved, but full of opportunity to learn more, see and taste more.

Irish – where it all began

March 17, 2016 by EmmaP

I’ve lived more of my life away from Ireland than in it, but of course I always think of it as home and part of my children’s identity too. Language is key to that. At school I learned Irish for many year starting at the age of 4, and it’s not an easy language to learn. But I really believe that early start got me to where I am today.

I was lucky to go to a primary school that had a positive attitude to the language, and in later years I was one of those kids who didn’t really mind wading through the 18th century epic poems, mad grammar and spelling, and the much-maligned kitchen sink drama of Dingle housewife Peig (a book known to be ritually destroyed after completing the exam). What made it tough for people was that it was mandatory: you had to pass it to enter university and get a civil service job. But it’s a wonderful language to hear and speak and has a deep, rich heritage, very close to the traditional music that I play and love.

My parents weren’t able to help much with my Irish homework – it was not taught well in the 1940s. But my siblings and I benefitted from the first great strides made during the 1970s to standardise the teaching of the language. An early advantage I discovered when moving away from home was how useful a secret language it could be — though you might get in trouble commenting about others on the London tube.

Irish – also called Gaelic, but that’s more for foreigners – is actually the official language so the country is technically bilingual. This means that street signs and paperwork are in two languages and as an EU minority language, taxpayers’ money pays for interpreters sitting in the European Parliament. Many people still think of it as a dying language, that too much is invested in it. A begrudger might indeed think I’ve lived away for too long and am too romantic about it. In reality only about 80,000 people speak Irish on a daily basis although this number has been growing and the many second-generation Polish and Nigerian children often famously learn it better than their peers.

Moving away from Dublin in 1995 I could not have imagined the blossoming of the language seen in the last 10 years, becoming cool enough that you’ll hear teenagers speaking it on the bus in Dublin (well, certain parts of the city). The Irish language TV station TG4 is an innovative broadcaster, full of lovely young faces, and if we were living in Ireland we might well have our children at the local gaelscoil (Irish school) to ensure they’re learning better than I ever did. You can actually study the language in most countries in the world.

I’m a strong believer that the learning of Irish from an early age – a language so structurally different to English – leads to a population naturally able to take on more languages (and indeed carry a tune). Many a smart politician during the Celtic Tiger was delighted to welcome the Dells, Googles and Facebooks who wanted to build their European headquarters in Ireland, encouraging them to take advantage of one of Europe’s most multi-lingual (and youngest) countries. And they’re still there, though the graduates have been leaving in droves since the recession – a story for another day.

After learning Irish from the age of 4, I started on school French at 10, then German for a few years and by the time I got to university (having survived all those exams about the modh coinniollach) I was all set to take on Italian or Russian. Italian won out and here I am, many years later, working on i pronomi possessivi with my 6 year old who can roll her Rs much better than I ever will.

Screen Shot 2016-03-17 at 15.46.38 — gaeltee.com

When my daughters were small, I would use some Irish phrases in everyday chat – Tabhair dom do lámh (give me your hand), Oíche mhaith (good night) or Tóg go bog é (calm down). I would have used more except we were living in Norway and needed to focus on getting used to Norwegian or just practising English. So for 7 years we mixed it up a bit.

Now, in Italy, we’re living through a third language and I’m figuring out how to do the trilingual thing with them – learning Italian, speaking English everyday but also remembering their Norwegian. (We only speak English at home).

But some of those old phrases are hard-wired – they’ll respond when I say them – and this morning the older one assured me she could say a few Irish words to her classmates if they were curious: Dia Dhuit (“Hello”, or literally “God be with you”) and Dia ‘s Muire Dhuit (“I’m grand thanks”, or literally – and I kid you not – “God and Mary be with you”.)

Conas tá tú – she waved at me as I walked away.

Tá mé go hiontach – I’m grand thanks!

Watch up Trump, here is coming il Presidente!

March 7, 2016 by EmmaP

This story hasn’t really hit the news and I can’t think why. An Italian has been pretending to run as a presidential candidate in the US and thousands have fallen for the joke.

You couldn’t make it up. The BBC revealed last week that an Italian marketing professional Alessandro Nardone transformed himself 8 months ago into “California congressman” Alex Anderson who was running as a candidate* for the US presidency. This was for a gag, to promote a novel Nardone had written about this character, Anderson. As part of the stunt he launched a pretty comprehensive online campaign with the benign tagline of #americaisnow, and to his surprise it actually took off and after a while he was getting media requests to join campaign debates. He never even left his small town in northern Italy and friends helped him record a campaign video at the local bar: in the video he whizzes along on his moped waving an American flag to loud guitar music, up to a group of “supporters”, stopping short of kissing one man on the cheek. He has over 20,000 twitter followers and attracted more each time he slagged off Hilary Clinton.

Fair play to him – he’s a smart guy who pulled off a crazy idea, he clearly understands social media, and indeed probably knows more about the US than many of its actual voters. He even thinks Edward Snowden should be president (or did he mean to say running mate?).

Now as a language nerd (and this is a language blog) I wonder – how could he have come this far? Reading through his website and twitter account, you should be able to see something is not quite right, but no-one realised anything was up.

We’re talking, of course, about bad English. That’s not to say that native-speaking politicians, or their interns, displays full mastery of the language. Anderson/Nardone seems to walk the thin line – he has enough confidence to get his meaning across, it’s just all a bit wobbly in the delivery.

How did people go with his opinions – or even understand what he was talking about? Here’s his bio which reads smoothly enough, if a little odd (and hilariously fake):

Alex was born thirty-nine years ago in the heart of Los Angeles, and grew up in San Pedro with his mother Ann, his father Ron and his inseparable friends seagulls, which he used to watch at the harbor, every day at sunset. After graduating from Yale, Alex got a PhD in International law and economics and, after only a few months, passed the exam becoming the youngest District Attorney of whole California.

Then it gets stranger and harder to read:

…in this case, the young Anderson seems to have what it takes. What do I mean? Wanting to be vague we could talk about simple cursus but as the Huffington Post here love to be precise, we say Skull andBones. It tells you nothing? But of course yes, who does not know the secret society the most famous and influentialof the Globe? Okay. So happens that both Bush senior as Bush son they so proudly part, just like Anderson, starting from his grandfather, to get to the “small” Alex. Strange life, right?

Were those people who followed him actually paying attention beyond the headlines on the website? Wonderful headlines like this one:

Someone clearly did some decent proofreading along the way (you can still get one of these for just $6!):

And then, as usual, it’s the status updates written on the fly that really show that something is (linguistically) very wrong.

Didn’t anyone notice the Italian accent shining through here?

Or mixed-up possessive pronouns?

But this guy claims to have been retweeted more than Jeb Bush and has more twitter followers than many other candidates*. Which makes us wonder how important Twitter really is at this level of “politics”. That’s something to look at in another post.

I could also look more at the general quality of English from someone like Trump or, indeed the Italian prime minister and some people even get picky about what Obama might have said wrong.

But hey, we do live in a democracy. Even – apparently – one that can cross oceans.

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*The complete list of declared candidates for the 2016 US election comes to 1,591. It includes characters like “Riff Raff”, “Luther T. The Merciless Lieutenant Ridiculous Warlord Stock”, “The Muslim Dictator Trump”, “Vladimir Putin” and the out-and-out “Antichrist”. But obviously you don’t have to be registered, or indeed real, to throw up on an online campaign.

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About Wash your Language

I’d love to help you polish your English! I offer web copywriting and editing as well as translation from Norwegian to English and Italian to English. Read more.

The songs on the bus go round and round

April 13, 2015 by EmmaP

Warning: this blog post contains an ear worm.

It’s a mid-winter Wednesday afternoon and we sit on the top deck of the 46a bus in Dublin, the bus route of my teenage years. I’m here with my two girls on one of our regular visits back to family.

The bus is quiet so my six year old decides to sing – what else but the theme song from Frozen. (You’ve heard it before.) She sings it once through. And then she sings it again, in Norwegian – a version the good people of Dun Laoghaire are strangely surprised to hear, and to be honest, not so excited about. Much as the song is hated by parents and bus-riders the world over, you have to admire the under-7 urge to belt it out in any language:

La den gå
La den gå
Perfekt er fortid så
Jeg er klar
Og jeg smiler bredt
La det storme her
Litt frost gjør meg ingenting uansett*

I was quite surprised when she came home from kindergarten last Autumn with this version in her repertoire. And then I was even more amazed to discover it was localized to 41 languages – the song (and film) is the most widely-translated yet by Disney who took pride in the mammoth task of finding local singers to tackle the wide vocal range of the original song, correct lipsynching, and transcreating the song’s admittedly rather complex lyrics to local meaning. The variations in titles alone hint at some serious cultural variations, from ”I Will Rise at Dawn” to ”I Have this Power” to ”It has Happened”. The multi-language ”behind the scenes” version on YouTube is inspiring millions of multi-lingual divas.

There has been some debate about the choice of languages – European languages being more in evidence than African or Indian. It is worth considering if 5 ”versions” for Scandinavia does balance against hundreds of sub-Saharan languages which would reach many many more viewers.

An interesting take by an Arabic scholar bemoans the strange backwards step taken by Disney in choosing Modern Standard Arabic rather than contemporary or Egyptian Arabic as used in other films. This version is actually closer to Classical Arabic and the results sound like – “I dread not all that shall be said! Discharge the storm clouds! The snow instigateth not lugubriosity within me…”

Growing up in Norway my kids have so far learned English songs and Norwegian songs, and they don’t often overlap – some notable exceptions being Old McDonald or Fader Jakob/Freres Jacques (which for some reason we confusingly sing in French unless you grow up in North America). And here was a full-on local version of this oversung song which many children might think was the version. All over the world.

When I first moved to Norway I heard kids on the bus (not many, they tend to keep pretty quiet here) singing their own approximated versions of the song of the day, Mamma Mia – indeed that was a ”Swedish” song I learnt when I was little. And sure, I’m all for hearing good Norwegian pop songs being sung or even hits Kardemomme By.

The prevalence of English songs in other countries is a big issue, I’ll save that for another day. But for now let’s just enjoy anyone who wants to sing and sing and sing.

*I don’t pass judgement here on the Norwegian translation of the lyrics but I do detect a little smirk in the Norwegian version of ”the snow never bothered me anyway”

** 2019 update: a reader of the blog has informed me that her father was actually the Norwegian lyricist!

About Wash your Language

I’d love to help you polish your English! I offer web copywriting and editing as well as translation from Norwegian to English and Italian to English. Read more.

Norwenglish 2 – Leave it as you found it

March 16, 2015 by EmmaP

It’s always fun to find ways to find equivalent words for some Norwegian terms. In our house we leave many words as they are, to keep things easy – barnehage, skattekort, trikk, matpakke, brødskiver and other terms that relate to the mechanics of Scandinavian daily life revolving around work and children.

In the blog post linked to below, the author has done a great job tackling 10 Norwegian terms. (Yes there are way more comments than content but it’s worth a read!)

My 2 kroner:

Kose – as verb, adverb, adjective – is a wonderful term and best kept in the original. It conveys so much of Norwegian warmth and good intent.

Takk for sist is also one of my favourites, once I figured it out. That was about the same time as Takk for meg/Takk for nå/Takk for idag/Takk for oss.

Døgn. How clever to have a word that means 24 hours, but you don’t have to say 24 hours!

Dugnad – I’ll come back to that one. The easiest thing is to just live here for a while and experience it for yourself.

Språkvask – the inspiration for this site! A lovely way to describe the cleaning or nitpicking of some text, to make communication clearer.

10 Untranslatable Norwegian Terms (Matadornetwork.com)

About Wash your Language

I’d love to help you polish your English! I offer web copywriting and editing as well as translation from Norwegian to English and from Italian to English. Read more.

Wash Your Language